Star Citizen, the upcoming massively-multiplayer space simulation game from developer Chris Roberts, has continued to make headlines since its announcement in 2012. The ambitious project launched a crowd-funding campaign in October of that year both on Kickstarter and the Star Citizen official website, managing to raise over six million dollars of the course of the following month.

At the time, Star Citizen broke records for the largest crowd-funded video game project when it hit over four million dollars just two days before the initial funding campaign closed. After the Kickstarter drive ended, Cloud Imperium continued the crowd-funding on the website, and has currently managed to earn over $55 million from backers.

Although perhaps not surprising, Star Citizen’s success is still very impressive, especially considering the project’s beginnings. The space sim is the passion project of game designer Chris Roberts, who developed other space games such as the Wing Commander franchise and Freelancer. Many gamers are hailing Star Citizen as the resurgence of the space sim, a genre that was very popular in the 90’s but fell out of favor in the 2000’s.This makes Star Citizen not only the most successful crowd-funded video game, but the largest crowd-funded campaign for any project of all time. The latest $55 million milestone has landed the game in the Guinness Book of World Records, which, while impressive, isn’t exactly surprising at this point. Gamers and those in the industry have been watching Star Citizen’s meteoric rise and growing support base since 2012, so the news hardly comes as a shock.

Furthermore, Chris Roberts has stressed that every dollar that gets pledged to the project goes to development and that the studio is not sitting on their laurels. He stated that Star Citizen is not being developed or funded like a “normal game,” and is not meant to be played for a short while and then put away like most titles.

With Star Citizen, Roberts is creating a massive open world complete with factions, player-owned space stations and fleets, and a persistent game universe based around community interaction. Star Citizen is currently in beta testing, but all gamers will get to explore this world when the final game launches some time in 2015.